December 5, 2012 to January 6, 2013
643 Park Avenue, between 66th and 67th streets
New York City, (212) 616-3930

Installation shot of The Event of a Thread by Ann Hamilton at the Park Avenue Armory,
December 2012. Photo: James Ewing

Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem ‘The Swing’ (from A Child’s Garden of Verses) offers an ebullient summons to Ann Hamilton’s wondrous new work at the Park Avenue Armory. A line from Stevenson sails into mind as—in the company of visitors ranging in age from infancy to near dotage, including portly businessmen whose well-cut jacket flaps trail behind them like the tails of flying fish—-I ascend weightless, airborne on one of 42 wooden plank swings.  Reminiscent of garment workers’ benches, these are suspended by chains some 70 feet from the drill hall ceiling . “Up in the air I go flying again,/ Up in the air and down!”  These blissful words might well have been known to the artist’s grandmother, who is lovingly credited by the artist as a prime source of inspiration for this entrancing piece.

The Gothic Revival Park Avenue Armory , erected just five years before the poem’s publication in 1885, provides a perfect venue for Hamilton’s swings, her 42 pigeons in miniature, stacked dovecotes, and the immense white silken fabric that billows from on high, responsively rising and falling according to the visitors’ velocities as they sway on their swings, pushed often by perfect strangers.  And the site irresistibly harks back to that other Armory, the one where in 1913 Modern Art erupted upon America.  Like Theodore Roosevelt back then, New York Times critic Roberta Smith (reviewing this show on December 6) wonders whether what surrounds us inside these Armory walls is art.  But, oh! It is!

Looming vast and drafty, 250 by 150 feet, the uncanny erstwhile home to military maneuvers, Wade Thompson Drill Hall seems forbidding at first glance. Lit dimly by Hamilton’s cunning lighting design, its awe and tremendum could easily dwarf anyone cursed with even a trace of agoraphobia. But any initial frisson of anxiety soon dissipates, for one of the triumphs of the art is how it “meets” that presenting enormity of space and—to borrow the verb chosen by the artist herself—“animates’ it.  She tames it but without completely sacrificing its inherent wildness.  Intimations of ambivalence about wildness abound as we enter the hall and try ourselves out in its immensity. Live pigeons, for example, greet our view, but caged, not free (at least most of the time, for there is a plan to release them once each day).  Pigeons, moreover, we note, are members of the same genus as doves (columbidae), which are symbols of peace; thus concord enters symbolically into a place devoted to the trappings of war.  And Emily Dickinson’s delicate trembling comes to mind, for, just as she, with her poesy, engages and magnifies the infinitesimal, so Ann Hamilton, artisan and conceptual visual artist, gentles, for us, the savage enormity of gargantuan space.

Hamilton’s enigmatic title strings words together that don’t at first make sense: for how can there be an event of a thread?  But wait!  ‘Event’ denotes not simply a happening but an outcome, as it joins the Latin prefix ‘ex,’ meaning ‘out,’ with ‘venire,’ meaning ‘to come.’ The outcome of a thread, when we parse it, takes us back to weaving, the craft with which Ann Hamilton began her trade as an artist.  And the outcome of a thread can be, indeed must be, open, free, undecidable.  This realization leads to an astonishing feature of the piece, namely, a large glass window seemingly cut through the exterior wall on the Armory’s Lexington side (in fact, this was achieved by rolling up a garage door and inserting glass) expressly as a way to release the work from its confines within the building and expand its metaphoric extension into the city streets.

Installation shot of The Event of a Thread by Ann Hamilton at the Park Avenue Armory,
December 2012. Photo: James Ewing

Quality of attention matters profoundly.  Imagine readers in furry capes sitting beside pigeons and reading aloud to them—words of complex texts, which are simultaneously transmitted into paper bag radios scattered about the floor of the Armory, among the swings, so that visitors can pick them up and carry them hither and yon. Through them, we become attuned to the notion that listening intently for individual words so as to catch their meaning only causes us to miss everything else that is going on in the space around us: our driven, unilateral search for logical connection lures us away from greater proto-logical and trans-logical states of mind and of being. Hamilton’s dense texts moreover cannot be followed logically, for they mirror woven fabrics, where the warp-and-woof is what matters.  We become like pigeons, who attend on a wholly other plane, or like children too young to grasp the intended meaning but not to feel embraced by the warmth of the reading human voice.

The Sufi epic by Farid al-din ‘Attar floated into consciousness as I swung through Hamilton’s installation.  In this work, paradox, reversal and mystery reveal truths inaccessible by the tools of reason and where, as led by the hoopoe bird, feathered creatures of all sorts (Hamilton’s pigeons) go in search of the unknown Simorgh.  Simorgh is found in the end by means of a mirror, just as one is set up in this piece to reflect the Armory space and its visitors while the transparent window extends it all in another direction.  Antimonies unsteadily holds truth, like a swing:   large and minute, individual and communal, human and animal, war and peace, inside and out, voice and motion (the rhythm of the spoken words, for example, which reiterate synaesthetically the back-and-forth motion of swinging).  And high and low, as the swings are attached by giant pulleys to the billowing white oceans of fabric which, suspended from the ceiling, extend across the entire space of the Armory hall.  By the most gossamer of threads— of silk and of sound—connections proliferate.

Gertrude Stein, in her celebrated 1935 essay ‘Pictures,’ seeks to separate the notion of literary idea from visual one.  Ann Hamilton blends these in her work.  By so doing, she unwittingly and uncannily evokes Stein; their streams of consciousness mutually establish intricate filaments of connection.  And one small wise child, standing at the entrance to the drill hall remarked: This is not like play, but like “wonder!”

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July 29 to November 5, 2012
11 West 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, www.moma.org

Jens S. Jensen, Boy on the Wall, Hammarkullen, Gothenburg, 1973. Photograph of Michael (age 9). Gelatin silver print, 9-1/2 x 11-3/4 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Jens S. Jensen, 2012

Arriving expectantly at the sixth floor atrium of MOMA, prodded by a mad crush of child-loving visitors of all ages and nationalities, you are met by the blow-up of an original gelatin silver print (Boy on Wall, Hammarkullen by Jens S. Jensen, 1973).  From a massive face of concrete blocks a child dangles, eerily hanging by his right arm, more than a body’s height above the ground.  Is it a boy or a girl?  The figure wears a leather jacket, or possibly that’s a quilted fabric, hard to tell, and the frowzy blond Christopher Robin haircut might signal either gender.  What about the smile? Not an exhibitionistic grin, as in “Hey, everybody!  Look what I can do!” Just a glance, acknowledging your arrival: “Oh, it’s you,” as if being suspended by one hand high above the earth were the most natural way in the world to greet someone.  No bravado, no fear of falling.  The perplexities of this uncanny image epitomize the show.  As you stare at it, you experience dysphoria, weightlessness, a fleeting sense of levitation, and you may even recoup your own childhood wish to float above the ground.  For the boy (it is, we read, a boy, named Michael, aged nine) actually seems to be suspended in front of the wall, not securely attached to it.  Is this an illusion, or not?

What, this image makes you wonder, will this exhibit on The Century of the Child have to do with flesh and blood children, pace its title? Who or what is the child?  What does it mean to design for the child?  What are the ethics of such an enterprise?  Presuming overall a rather bland and benign notion of childhood (think of Locke’s tabula rasa), the show withdraws for the most part from messy engagements with actual children.  Children float suspended and detached from what is presented: like the figure in the Swedish photograph, the work on view in these MOMA galleries bypasses emotion (with some notable exceptions, including film footage related to the 1940s work of Bauhaus-trained designer Friedl Dicker-Brandeis with children in the Terezín concentration camp near Prague, and Polish director Andrzej Wolski’s 2011 film, Toys, that features Warsaw children scrounging in the rubble after World War II).  Much of the intense passion, however—the felt crises, anxieties, puzzlements, riotous humor, and delirious joys— that characterize living children both mentally and behaviorally has gone missing.  The distance off the ground, so to speak, can be disconcerting.

Indeed, what this ample, richly crowded, and perhaps unintentionally provocative seven-room exhibition reveals—in spite of itself— is a thoroughgoing exposé, decade after decade, of nearly unbroken top-down efforts to use, exploit, and control as well as engage children, sometimes by imitating them, occasionally by mocking them, all the while subsuming them under whatever artistic style, political agenda, or commercial opportunity happens to be ascendant.  No major effort has been taken by the otherwise remarkably diligent curators to do more than show this. How have the successive waves of stylized objects on display—toys, furniture, books, clothing, as well as imagery, shifting educational practices, and spatial arrangements actually impacted the children exposed to them?  A visitor seeks in vain for critique and evaluation—for any report on the later effects of all this adult-perpetrated design on youth.  Few questions are aired.   A typical text panel reads:  “In such rooms, it was felt, children’s spontaneity and pleasure in learning would flourish.”   But why was that felt?  And by whom?  And was this feeling ever put to a test?

Joaquín Torres-García, painted wood figures, interchangeable pieces, dimensions vary, c. 1925. Daniela Chappard Foundation. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Spain

Walking from room to room, you are struck by the way the putative child, objectified despite protestations to the contrary, has been incorporated into period style, the vector being culture > child, not the reverse: the Arts & Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau, Expressionism, Futurism, De Stijl,  Pop Art, digital art.  Despite claims that artists’ approaches were rooted in desires to understand children, you may come away feeling that, if the twentieth century is indeed The Century of the Child, surely that child is as much a projection of adult fantasy and social ideology as the pale coy innocents of the pre-Raphaelites or the bedizened seventeenth century infantas of Velázquez.

A Gargantuan wooden table with a climbable oversized chair and step stool offer adults who try them out a bodily take on children’s experience.  Mugging visitors pose on them for photo ops, while uniformed security personnel control access by ordering people brusquely to form a queue.  For one split second, I clamber up on the chair and, when the tabletop reaches barely to my nose, my bygone helplessness and marginalization as a child rush back in a flood:  I am Gulliver in Brobdingnag until an officious guard whisks me away: “You can’t spend any time here,” he admonishes sternly; now, I truly am a child.

Visitors chuckle and guffaw at wall-mounted black and white 1927 footage of a three or four-year-old who steers his kiddie-motor wheel of fanciful circular design along an empty road.   His father, in fedora, tie, and three-piece suit, chases him dutifully, unable to keep up as the child and his mini-vehicle careen along a wide unpopulated avenue in zigzag swaths, as if illustrating the line from Isaiah 11 (“the little child shall lead them”) or Wordsworth’s similar sentiment from the Rainbow poem of 1802.  Throughout the exhibit, which is thronged morning and afternoon, spectators seem euphoric, entranced by images such as this.  They appear bemused and nostalgic, while their children respond especially to movement for, as Fénelon wisely wrote, children are happiest when their bodies are in motion, when they can change position.

Late in the show, you come upon a striking work that chimes with the Jensen photograph you met at the start:  Paul Rand, in 1996, shortly before his death, composes a flat black child, upside down, arms akimbo, balancing precariously on a slanting tightrope made of words.  The great designer fills in the body with saucy details from Breughel’s Children’s Games (1560) to create an indelible poster in support of a village devoted to orphaned and abandoned children.

Aesthetically, top prize belongs to The Adventures of Prince Achmed, an exquisite dreamlike shadow film by Berlin artist Lotte Reiniger (1923-25) that plays silently in a gallery labeled “Avant Garde Play Time.” Possibly the earliest surviving animated film, this gossamer confection was painstakingly made by hand, its style inspired by finger puppets, embroidery, and lace making.  Reiniger, who invented her own techniques, created this masterpiece by scissor work, intricately cutting out characters of astonishingly delicate beauty, which, in an evanescent world, sway, prance, bow, and embrace while enacting stories of intrigue, romance, and suspense drawn from the Arabian Nights.  Reiniger’s villain, a wicked enchanter known as the African Magician, appears maleficently in Aladdin and the Magic Lamp.  To stand spellbound watching as these silhouetted tales unfurl their sinister plots and metamorphoses in ever-swirling motion until Prince Achmed is at last reunited with his slender fairy Peri Banou, is to recapture a childhood in which magic is real and flying demons are more true than anything attached to solid earth.

This thought returns us to the elevated image with which we began — the photographed child in the air— and leads me to conclude that, if real children are to be found in this show, they must be summoned, like genii, from encounters with whatever designed objects move us most, for there is, after all, no such thing as the child but rather millions of uniquely responsive children, and adults, for whom childhood, despite varying degrees of distance, can still be occasionally invoked.  Perhaps that is as close as we will ever come to the angel with the flaming sword who guards the way back, as Ernst Gombrich wrote famously once in his essay on the hobby horse.

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Excerpt from "Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama" by Alison Bechdel. Copyright © 2012 by Alison Bechdel. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Alison Bechdel’s engrossing new graphic memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama is a worthy successor to the work of Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, William Steig, and Bill Watterson. Bechdel’s book follows by six years her widely acclaimed Fun Home, which memorializes an aesthetically absorbed, emotionally constricted, closeted gay funeral director—Bechdel’s father—who putatively committed suicide when Bechdel was twenty.  This synopsis, however, conveys nothing of Bechdel’s originality and erudition, her meticulous drawing, her sensitivity to suggestive design.

Fun Home opens with a young Bechdel perched on her father’s upended feet for an airplane ride she calls “Icarian.” Casting her father in the role of Daedalus, she cherishes this game because, in the “arctic” gloom of their gothic Victorian mansion in rural Pennsylvania, it provides her with rare moments of physical contact.  (Her mother stopped kissing her goodnight when she was seven.)  At the end of the book, Bechdel draws herself as a slightly older child in a swimming pool with her father who holds out his arms as if to catch her. She ponders what would have happened if instead of plunging to his death (like her father, who fell under a truck), Icarus had lived and inherited his father’s talents? A coda to the Daedalus-Icarus myth—not mentioned by Bechdel—explains that Daedalus was involved with a talented young apprentice called Perdix of whom he was jealous and whom he managed to drown for fear of being surpassed.  His own beloved son’s subsequent fall to doom, therefore, can be read as a punishment visited upon Daedalus. This silent back-story shadows Bechdel’s art.  For in her personal fantasy, her father doubles as craftsman-perpetrator and victim.

Are You My Mother? is a title borrowed from another pictured quest for a parent published in 1960, the year of Bechdel’s birth.  In this now classic children’s book by P.D. Eastman, available even on YouTube, a newborn bird goes in search of its mother who has left the nest to forage.  With no idea what to look for, the small bird wanders off; after a string of zany and dangerous mistakes, it eventually finds her. In Bechdel’s case, the finding involves not her mother per se but an understanding of her.

Excerpt from "Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama" by Alison Bechdel. Copyright © 2012 by Alison Bechdel. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Through her unsparing pictorial narration, we see, hear, and swallow the struggles that lacerate every childhood.  (Not by accident does a mirror adorn this book’s jacket). This is American life at its most candid.  It stops mattering very much that the author hails from a Catholic family, that Bechdel is a lesbian, or that she has created this work while her mother is bristlingly alive and cognizant of the project.  Bechdel’s journey—backward in time—brings her in contact with a host of non-mothers (including a famous psychoanalyst, a pair of warmly caring women psychotherapists, and lesbian lovers) — but also iterations of her actual mother, who proves beautiful, highly literary, self-disciplined, and who morphs repeatedly according to decade fashions.  However, Bechdel’s mother remains enduringly remote:  “’I can’t help you. You’re on your own,’” she announces tersely when told about her daughter’s need to do the Fun Home memoir.  A child hearing such words knows with a pang that he or she is actually chained to the parent who says this.

Smarting like a slap, her rebuff occurs in an exchange so dreaded by the artist that, anticipating it, she almost crashes into a truck.  “I hope that in time you’ll come to understand,” she imagines herself saying as she steers along a road with a background sign that reads: “No Shoulder.”  The ensuing letdown foreshadows much that is to come. But unlike authors of smarmy bad-mother diatribes who in retaliation sharpen knives of resentment, Bechdel achingly wants not to fight but to understand:  what has her withholding mother not withheld from her? Sharing each hard-won insight, she welcomes readers to re-think their own less than perfect parents.

Generous without sacrificing honesty, Bechdel twins herself with her mother by drawing both characters with strikingly matched jet-black hair, a color code she accentuates by making all the other significant women blonde.  This twinning holds even when Bechdel’s mother turns gray, for in those images her short bob mimics her daughter’s boyish cut.  Like so much else, the visual pairing performs its effects subliminally.

Chapters begin with pictured dreams. The first of these appears transparently birth-like in that the artist must escape through a tiny window and plunge in fetal pose into turgid water.  Icarus comes readily to mind.  Each chapter’s title, moreover, cites a theoretical premise by the late British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott, the artist’s adoptive intellectual mentor. She even resuscitates Winnicott in imaginative scenarios as she does likewise Virginia Woolf.  Interlarding well-chosen snippets of literature and psychoanalytic theory with the wrenching details of her life, she offers transferable interpretive insights. The book itself becomes a teaching tool.

Several times Bechdel informs us of her mother’s spider phobia and, elsewhere, of her own childhood horror of vomiting.  In a riveting page, she connects the two in a session with her first therapist. Awakening her mother in the middle of the night, Bechdel (age 10) vomits a mess that uncannily resembles a spider.  Her mother’s affect is uncharacteristically kind, but a phobia ensues.  The principal link concerns unconscious aggression and rejection, for a mother’s most primitive function is to feed her child, and vomiting reverses this completely.  Children feel shame and sometimes even terror as their bodies lurch out of control.  As for the spider, it condenses every constructive and destructive maternal impulse into one irregular black shape.  Louise Bourgeois’ Mamans materialize as we read. Bechdel, twinned with her mother yet painfully distant from her, eventually learns that she cannot find her in this book, but she can recreate her.

A paradigmatic scene constitutes the book’s climax, and it occurs twice.  Needing special shoes to correct her arches when she was small, Bechdel was taken for repeated visits to a hospital where she witnessed severely crippled children and found herself envying them just as Bemelmans’s Madeline is envied by the other little girls because of the attention won by her appendectomy.  In Madeline, Miss Clavel silences them, but Alison Bechdel enjoys a superior fate.  Bidding hard, she pretends to be a crippled child herself.  With bated breath we watch as an amazing scene unfolds.  Her mother joins in, makes believe with her, offers her imaginary leg braces, even pretends to lace up a pair of special shoes.  What Bechdel comes to realize through this re-animation is how her mother actually gave her some of what she needed to become an artist.  The mother-spider cripples you but also helps you walk.  The family’s background, in which a mother is sexually sidelined by a husband who preferred young men, a mother moreover who was taught long ago by her own mother to favor sons over daughters, begins to fade.  What matters is that she plays!  And that Bechdel can use her now, in Winnicott’s sense, of discovering that, no longer compelled to experience her as a need-gratifying object, she can recognize what has been offered all along as well as what was denied.  And the book closes with measured gratitude and the words: “She has given me the way out.”  This “meta-book,” as Bechdel’s mother called it, is a masterful meditation on growing up.

Are Your My Mother? A Comic Drama By Alison Bechdel. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Illustrated. 290 pages, ISBN 0618982507  $22.

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Leo Steinberg speaking at the memorial tribute to Jeanne-Claude at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 2010. Photo: Phyllis Tuchman

Evenings, before his last debilitating fall, Leo would wait for me standing, posed nonchalantly—oxymoron fully in force—at, not quite in, the open doorway of his seventeenth-floor New York City apartment in an architecturally undistinguished modern skyscraper across from Lincoln Center.   Normally, I would arrive at around seven, and when I was late, he would sometimes say he had begun to worry that I had forgotten.  Which hurt and puzzled me because of its sublime incongruity.  As if I could forget!  There was no iconic cigarette any more (they were forbidden finally by a doctor who threatened him into compliance).  Just the well-published knowing look, mischievous and boyish, despite his nearly ninety years.  His contrapposto, like so much else about him, exuded complexity—message  and mystery enmeshed.  Standing at his open doorway, he occupied a liminal space, and Leo seemed to me in so many ways a liminal figure.   He was waiting expectantly and, as I emerged from the elevator each time, the sight of him sent an electric current through my body.  Partly reverence, partly pleasure, partly amazement.  My awe of him never abated, and it returns even as I write these words.

Leo Steinberg (1920-2011) will be remembered as one of the most learned, eloquent, and original thinkers who ever graced the discipline of art history.  His erudition and revolutionary ways of seeing art are, like his scholarly range, nonpareil, for he wrote luminously not only on the Italian Renaissance masters of his principal training, such as Borromini, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo, but delectably and perspicaciously on Velasquez, Rodin, Picasso, and on a host of twentieth-century painters including De Kooning, Pollock, and Johns.  He famously said:  “It is naïve to imagine that you avoid the risk of projecting merely by not interpreting.  In desisting from interpretation, you do not cease to project.  You merely project unwittingly.  For there is no escape from oneself . . . ”  (Other Criteria, 1972).

At first, I wanted to bring him tokens—of esteem and affection—especially because he was largely shut in, confined to his apartment, and I once essayed a delicate bouquet of peach-colored scented lilies.  He was not pleased.  Do not bring me flowers, he said, for they simply die and must be thrown out, and that makes me sad.  But why can’t you simply enjoy them while they are alive? I queried in surprise.  He remained adamant.  Reluctantly, I gave up my floral offerings.  He told me that at his time of life he wanted no presents of any kind.  He reminded me of a colleague whose mansion near London’s Hampstead Heath is filled with bric-a-brac and objets d’art amassed over decades and who now, rather than allow guests to arrive with gifts, encourages them to take away something every time they pay a visit.  Leo gave me something every time I paid him a visit.  He gave me words—intangible and priceless.  I do not know in turn what I gave him, as he refused almost everything.

Pablo Picasso, Meditation (Contemplation), 1904. Watercolor and ink on paper, 14-1/2 x 10-1/2 inches. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Louise Reinhardt Smith Bequest. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“The gloom of the mind and the light of the body” (1972, 93), he once wrote.   Enunciating syllables with care, he would sometimes apologize that he was “not in good voice.”  I knew what he meant, but to me that slight quaver cast an incantatory spell.  On one occasion, he told me an anecdote about his psychoanalysis with, as it happens, a former teacher of mine at Columbia, a fact that, not wishing to interrupt him (he did not like being interrupted), I forbore to mention.  He started by referring to an article he wrote for Life Magazine. That was in 1968, and its opening gambit concerns a haunting watercolor by Picasso, painted during the Blue Period in 1904.  The artist, in profile, then twenty-three years old, sits at a table gravely watching a girl sleep, her left arm bent to cradle her head.  Clad in melting blue with a white scarf, the painter appears to be daydreaming, while the girl herself actually dreams.  Discussing this picture with his analyst, Leo mentioned that he detected in it an inversion of aggression.  He made no further comment.  But I quickly knew.  For, although the gaze of a male artist at an immobilized female figure tends to be conventionally seen as aggressive (male toward helpless female), Leo was constitutionally attuned to the less obvious.  He detected in the scene an element of counter-aggression.  Leo’s analyst responded to his intuition with an empathic elaboration:  What about the aggression that lies latent in a kept secret?  He asked.  The response impelled Leo to rise and begin pacing the room.  With his inimitable brand of calm fervor, he described the encounter as an epiphany.  Gazing into the distance, he explained the immensely liberating insight: within the throes of this exchange, he had grasped the wondrously empowering idea that his unconscious was actually working with him in his creative endeavors.  The scene took on the aspect of a revelation, and I in turn reveled in the heightened intonation of his speech as he relived the dramatic story.

The two of us are seated face to face at a small table, only slightly unstable, located just outside his cramped, typically windowless city kitchen.  We are surrounded by a sepia mise-en-scène of prints, statuettes, antiquarian books, papers, journals, and letters and equipped with tiny inverted bell-shaped etched glasses of a liqueur Leo has poured from a delicately tinted bottle, or, perhaps it is only I who sip the liqueur, as he often prefers a tumbler of apple juice.  He urges me to eat.  But in his presence I am never hungry.  His incessant flow of words, associations, ideas, and images fills me to brimming so that I am unable to take in much food or drink and want for nothing except to be able to concentrate fully, to be absolutely present to this extraordinary intellect, which billows out far beyond the confines of the frail body it now inhabits.  If only I could catch fast, grasp tight, hold on!  But the elegant sentences flutter by on gossamer wings and vanish in the ether only to be replenished by others equally alluring.  How can I embrace and preserve all this?  He cannot live forever.  His blue eyes smolder with an amber glow, his tapered fingers occasionally gesture to emphasize a point.  His still thick grey locks curl tightly.  Burning to reach out my arms in a hopeless gesture, I bring them in closer, self-consciously, toward my own body.

We move over to the couch, where Leo has taken out a portfolio to show me his life drawings, which he deprecates, some made when he was an art student at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and also a strange little childhood sculpture of a horse he has kept since he was a boy.  He talks about the value of a sure line and the problems students have with drawing extremities—feet and hands.  Sternly, he deplores a hesitant line, one that staggers at the edges, lurching, limping, redirecting and correcting itself.  He wants me to take note that he had no fears about completing the human form.  Nor did his hand limp.  I sigh, shyly recalling a moldering black portfolio filled with my own youthful life drawings on newsprint done at the Art Students League in New York and in Boston at the Museum School, but I do not speak of them.  Leo’s drawings appear skillful and beautiful to me, but to him they are merely academic, devoid of spark or originality.  I had, he insists, nothing new to say as an artist; on the contrary, I realized that when I gazed at art, I could see what others failed to find.  Thus, Leo Steinberg left the studio forever and turned exclusively to the study of art—to gazing intently for years—and to the alchemy of written words.

One evening in a conversation on education, I am lamenting that children no longer memorize poetry.  Leo leans back, and in a voice made soft only by lack of strength starts reciting to me, line-by-line, Milton’s Paradise Lost.  My eyes fill with tears as I listen.  Here was a man whose mother tongue was Russian, who learned Hebrew, Latin, also German, English, Italian, and I do not know what others and who sits calmly before me at the end of his life declaiming these glorious lines of seventeenth-century blank verse, and he goes on until I beg him to stop because I cannot bear it.  Will there ever again be anyone in the world who can do this?  Now that people depend on Google and such.  Furthermore, Leo knows the Hebrew Bible chapter and verse; citing passages when we talk, he refines my understanding and teaches me.  His family, having moved to Germany from Russia, went on to England to escape the Nazis and thence he came to New York.  One of Leo’s best stories involves the renowned art historian and distinguished immigrant European scholar of the era, Erwin Panofsky.

In answer to a question I pose, Leo tells me that one morning he had been studying in the library of the Institute of Fine Arts.  Emerging in the company of a fellow student, he enters a nearby café where they are astonished to find Panofsky and his wife occupying the next booth.  Leo goes over to the great man, introduces himself as an Institute student, says he has been reading all morning, and quips that it is most unusual to come out of the library and encounter in person the very author whose work one has been studying for hours!  Panofsky asks him what he has been reading, and when Leo hands him the used book, Panofsky spies, written inside in small letters, a name he knows.  Startled, Panofsky tells Leo that this was his first student.  He recalls how concerned he had been for the young man, who was a Jew.  Panofsky feared that, because of rampant anti-Semitism in Germany, there was a chance the student would not be allowed to pass his doctoral exams.  To help him, expressly to sit on his committee and assure his success, Panofsky returned to Germany.  Afterwards, he helped the young scholar obtain a teaching post in America.  Leo now gets up slowly to find the book as he wants to show me Panofsky’s inscription, for on that serendipitous occasion Panofsky had signed the book to Leo: To Leo Steinberg from Erwin Panofsky in the Apostolic Succession, or words to that effect.  Needless to say, Leo relishes the bittersweet irony of this.  For, whereas “Apostolic Succession” denotes an ecclesiastical doctrine of inheritance of spiritual and sacramental authority which passes from early Christianity to the present—from the twelve Apostles to present day Catholic bishops worldwide— in Panofsky’s inscription the term refers to the successive waves of disenfranchised Jews who fled from a dangerous Europe to America, Jewish students, that is, of art history like himself and his student and Leo: a very different laying on of hands.

I am brooding now.  On other stories that lurk untold in the pockets of this protean mind, this intensely lived life, this congested psychic space.  Leo picks up Other Criteria, his acclaimed magnum opus in which the original Picasso essay was republished, and reads to me from it.   He mentions brief remarks on Jeanne Claude he must deliver at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  He turns to his unfinished, never-to-be completed work on Michelangelo’s Doni tondo, a propped print of which has adorned his worktable for as long as I can remember.  In one of the bookcases under the windows on which a long row of small bright plastic cigarette lighters supply the only kitsch and spark of saturated color, he searches for and reads to me a Tennyson poem, in which the poetic speaker cannot tolerate the carefree joy of a young girl and suffers murderous impulses towards her.  Leo knows why, for he has experienced this himself.  The room seems suffused with russet; it has grown late.  Melancholy descends.  I glance furtively at the row of darkened windows facing southeast over the unvarnished city.  Awkwardly, I find my wrap, and Leo insists on going downstairs with me, a practice that will cease as his strength ebbs.  After he has said goodbye and I am safely in the taxi, I feel blank.  He will die, scream the speeding traffic and indifferent strobe lights that flash across my strained face.

Yet, the months pass, and especially after his fall and enforced restriction to a single chair even for sleeping, Leo seems to relax into a mode of resignation.  I have saved several of his voice messages on my cell phone so that I can still listen to the timbre of his modulated voice and meticulously chosen words.  But, as with my father, it happened in March and caught me by surprise.  In spite of everything.  He was also ninety: a grand age.  Now Leo Steinberg has become, for the world, as Wallace Stevens titled one of his poems, a man made out of words.   He was never merely that.  He lived fully, as again per Stevens (from “Esthétique du Mal”), in a physical world, and yet he knew that desire could be difficult to tell from despair.

Ellen Handler Spitz, who is Honors College Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland (UMBC, writes on the arts and psychology.

A version of this tribute will appear in American Imago (The Johns Hopkins University Press) later this year.